In a computing environment, a data storage and management system can provide access to information stored on one or a plurality of storage devices networked to the system. Storage devices may comprise disk drives, a plurality of which can be organized as disk arrays. Disks may describe a magnetic media storage unit, and may be synonymous with a hard disk drive, a direct access storage device, solid state drive, or other similar media used for persistent data storage. Data can be organized into volumes that are comprised on disk drives of one or more storage devices.
A plurality of storage system may be interconnected to provide a distributed storage system, for example, designed to mitigate problems with data access speed and availability. Such a clustered system distributes volumes serviced by a particular storage system to the plurality of storage systems in the cluster. This, in-turn, distributes data access requests among the storage systems in the cluster, thereby distributing a processing load that may accompany said requests.
Storage systems, including clustered storage systems, can be configured to accommodate a plurality of clients, in a client/server model, for data access and management. For example, a client may comprise an application running on a computer that connects to the storage system (or cluster) over a network. Clients can typically request services from the storage system by issuing packet-based, protocol requests to the system over the network. In-turn, the storage system may return requested data, or perform some data management request.
One may wish to link two or more independent cluster storage systems together, for example, providing a larger scale distributed storage system. Creating relationships between independent clusters can help alleviate some of the problems that are mitigated by creating a clustered storage system, such as specific data access and distributed operations for load balancing. However, associating independent clusters together can present logistical issues that are time consuming and difficult for a system administrator to handle.
Typically, if an administrator wishes to associate independent clusters, they must perform separate steps manually. For example, clusters are often manually authenticated by passing authentication back and forth between peer clusters; network addresses are sent between administrators of the peers, and are managed manually; and networking protocols need to be tunneled between the clusters, and the health of the peer systems must be manually monitored. Essentially, cross-cluster features typically need manual intervention by a cluster administrator.